TURKEY: Under a hail of machine gun fire, 4,000 Australian and New Zealand soldiers struggled ashore a narrow beach 90 years ago in the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign that would claim more than 130,000 lives.
Blinded by darkness, hundreds of men from the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (Anzac) were cut down on April 25th, 1915, at the edge of a remote peninsula in western Turkey now known as Anzac Cove.
The epic waste of life was captured in the 1981 Peter Wier film Gallipoli starring, among others, the young Mel Gibson. The film portrayed the abandon with which young men were ordered out of their trenches to run into the fire of Turkish gunners, achieving nothing save their own deaths.
At daybreak yesterday, Australian prime minister John Howard, New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark, Britain's Prince Charles and other officials honoured the Anzac on the milestone anniversary of one of the bloodiest battles of the first World War.
They were joined by 15,000 Australians and New Zealanders, as well as Turks, for the largest-ever Anzac Day that marks an event that shaped the birth of all three nations.
"Those who fought here ... changed forever the way we saw the world and ourselves," said Mr Howard, standing before a black Aegean Sea as a lone frigate sailed past.
While the last-known Gallipoli veteran died in 2002, Anzac Day has become a pilgrimage for mainly young tourists from Down Under. They quietly huddled under blankets throughout the night as winds lashed the Dardanelles peninsula near the Bosphorous channel which links the Mediterranean and Black seas.
"Visiting Gallipoli is something every Australian wants to do," said Rob Walters (32) of Bellarat, who draped himself in his nation's flag. "It is current with every generation."
Gallipoli was the first time Australia and New Zealand fought under their nations' own flags, and this ribbon of land halfway around the world has become their national touchstone.
It also heralded the rise of Kemal Ataturk, the Turkish officer who led the resistance. He later founded modern Turkey, the republic that emerged from the ruins of the Ottoman empire.
Back home in Australia and New Zealand, tens of thousands gathered for pre-dawn services, including veterans from the second World War and the Korean and Vietnam wars, as well as those who have recently served in Iraq.
In Iraq, at a small gathering of gum trees, Australian troops held a service, with a Turkish officer reading a memorial.
"We have a bond with the Turkish people. We both have pride for our heroes and sadness for those who lost their lives," said Nancy Clark, a retired Australian army nurse, at Anzac Cove.
Although the fighting was brutal, as the campaign dragged on empathy developed between enemy forces who tossed each other food from trenches and held ceasefires to collect their dead.
The Anzac invasion seemed cursed from the start. They were to have stormed a larger beach but a current brought them north to this strip of sand surrounded by sand cliffs.
Australia and New Zealand were part of a British-led force, which included French and Indian units, that aimed to open the Turkish straits to wartime ally Russia. After eight months, the Allied forces withdrew from Gallipoli in bitter defeat.
"We don't see the Anzac as enemies, but as victims. They were sent to fight an unknown enemy in an unknown land," said Turgut Ucer, from Usak in southern Turkey. "It touches us that people come this far. They honour our dead along with theirs."
Some of the nearly 11,000 Anzac troops who died are buried at Lone Pine cemetery further up the peninsula. Britain lost more than 21,000 men and France 8,700. Turkish casualties were nearly three-fold that of rival combatants. - (Reuters)